Bing A.I. and the Dawn of the Post-Search Internet

Around a year ago, I wrote a column about users' growing frustration with Google Search, as automated summaries, sponsored content, and S.E.O.-tailored spam increasingly crowded out the kinds of useful Web site results that Googling was supposed to produce. Google's search algorithm wasn't directing us to the information that we wanted to find (for instance, in my case at the time, the elusive perfect toaster) so much as bombarding us with the half-baked recommendations of content mills. Yet Google Search has maintained its dominance partly out of habit and partly because no competing service has offered a viable alternative--until now. On February 7th, Microsoft began a beta launch of a version of its search engine, Bing, in the form of an A.I. chatbot, powered by GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI's large-language model ChatGPT. Instead of directing users to external sites, the new Bing can simply generate its own answers to any query.